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A good many educators take seriously the idea that teaching is a political activity and accordingly feel justified in using their classrooms as platforms for spreading their social, economic, and philosophical beliefs. They want to act as “change agents” who will improve the world.

Most of those educators have been imbued with a leftist cast of mind – hostile to capitalism, private property, and anything that stands in the way of their utopian visions of a just society brought about through government power. Instances like the recent ones at UC Santa Barbara (where a professor physically attacked a student who was peacefully protesting abortion) and Eastern Connecticut (where a writing professor went off on a rant about how evil Republicans are) are pretty common.

Of course, there are non-leftist educators, but most of them are content just to teach their subjects rather than trying to turn students into ideological clones of themselves. I don’t think that education should be hijacked for political objectives of any sort.

Anecdotes about leftist politicization on our college campuses abound, but if you want a meticulous study documenting that, you could read “A Crisis of Competence: The Corrupting Effect of Political Activism in the University of California.” The paper leaves no doubt that inappropriate leftist politics have saturated most of the UC campuses.

But when the study was presented to the administration and the UC Board of Regents, they brushed it off. Evidently, the people in charge don’t want to tangle with faculty members who believe that they should be permitted to teach whatever they please.

If you’re someone who thinks that the politicization of education is a bad trend, you’ll be aghast at a recent book arguing that higher education in America needs to have even more of a leftist slant: Why Higher Education Should Have a Leftist Bias by Donald Lazere, a professor emeritus in the English Department at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo.

What he wants to accomplish with the book is to show America how horribly it is distorted by corporate/conservative culture and politics. But what Professor Lazere actually accomplishes is to show how poorly many avowedly left-wing academics understand those who don’t subscribe to their belief system.

Lazere says he wrote the book because he wants to make common cause with conservative educators in “elevating the level of civic education to that of reasoned debate.” He writes that most Americans, including college students, aren’t able to think through the constant barrage of false and misleading “right-wing” indoctrination that saturates the country. That creates a “conservative” slant that keeps most Americans from grasping the truths of leftist criticism and seeing how much better off we would be if truly progressive politicians and thinkers could have their way.

In the author’s own words, “Critical pedagogy and left media have a legitimate responsibility to provide minimal balance against the far more powerful forms of conservative bias in American society.”

From Lazere’s perspective, the dark and greedy forces of corporate America and its right-wing attack machine have prevented President Obama from moving full-throttle to transform the U.S. into the wonderful country we could enjoy. He maintains that the country is so dominated by “conservative” thinking that college professors must try to even things up.

It’s impossible to take that seriously.

Twice the U.S. elected the very leftist Obama, and has many media outlets that push relentlessly for more statist policies and demonize anyone who opposes them. We have a populace that’s about equally split between those who want an expanded government and those who don’t. False and deceptive leftist arguments have at least as much impact as all the commentary coming from the other side – I’d say much more. For example, Lazere repeats the erroneous notion that the housing bubble and resulting financial meltdown was due to greedy people in business. Sadly, he doesn’t realize that he has been misled by the left’s own “attack machine” on this issue (and many others).

I’m in agreement with Lazere to this extent—some of the nation’s ailments are due to “conservative” forces and some of the misdeeds he rightly laments were done by people on “the right.” What he is unable to see, however, is that there is a common thread to all of those ailments and misdeeds, namely the excessive power of the state -- power that enables liberals, conservatives, and apolitical people to exploit government for their selfish ends.

There are many educators who make the principled case that big government conservatism and big government liberalism are equally blameworthy for our ills. but Lazere dismisses them because he thinks they’re bound up with loathsome “conservatism.”

If Lazere really wants to make “common cause” with educators who aren’t of his persuasion, he has gone about it poorly because the book’s tone is uncharitable and off-putting. Despite a perfunctory statement that “conservative positions may be defensible on a more complex cognitive level,” the writing drips with contempt for all the “polemicists” who oppose his vision.

Most of the book consists of tiresome pages in which the author recounts his battles against the evil forces of conservatism. He explains why Rush Limbaugh was wrong about this and that, why David Horowitz is misleading, why the National Association of Scholars has no credibility (generally and specifically that study mentioned above), why Bill Bennett is a hypocrite, why it’s erroneous to equate the Koch brothers with George Soros—and on and on.